Question on Rome's decline

well the real problem was that it stagnated. Rome has often been depicted as a peak of human cultural development. It really wasn't. From a high point around the reign of Augustus which ended with Marcus Aurelius roman quickly degenerated into what i would call totalitarianism. Can you believe that by the end of the second century it was illegal to choose a profession other than that of your father, you couldn't even leave the land you lived on.
Two things: first of all, it wasn't until very near the end of the third century that the laws effectively attempting to institute a caste-based system by limiting occupational freedom were introduced under Diocletian. It's also important to note that it was more of an effect of Rome's decline than a cause of it: the constant civil war and near-collapse of the empire during the third century destroyed most of Rome's political institutions, of course, but it also did a number on the Roman economy. The new laws were part of Diocletian's attempt to stabilize the economy, which also included empire-wide pricing controls.

Actually, going back to the original post, the Dominate that Diocletian introduced and Constantine refined and replaced the earlier Principate of Augustus was basically a much stronger central government. I would also argue that it did save Rome. The Roman Empire would likely have crumbled completely well before the fifth century if not for the reforms. It's also worth noting that the drive to centralize Roman government was a key element of Constantine's moving the capital to Byzantium, and that allowed the eastern half of the empire to persist for another millennium.

But back to my second point, I think it's a mistake to read modern political labels back onto ancient Rome. Yes, Diocletian's reforms are, in some respects, similar to modern totalitarianism, but there are some major differences in both cause and effect. Also, I'm not convinced that, even if we do classify Rome as a totalitarian state, that has any impact on whether or not it's "a peak of human cultural development." India's caste system was far more restricting than anything Imperial Rome ever devised, and India has produced some of the most valuable cultural artifacts the world has ever seen. The same can be said for Imperial China.

Roman civilisation was essentially the enslavement of the countryside on behalf of the city. What the Legions spent most of their time doing was terrorising the rural population into surrendering food.
I don't think that's particularly fair or particularly true. True, much of Roman cultural and political life was centered around the city, but that's also true of almost every major civilization in world history. More importantly, taken as a whole, Roman history pretty much moves in exactly the opposite direction. One way of viewing the rise of the empire and the displacement of the republican system is as a response to the fact that the republic worked well for a small to medium-sized city-state, but given the realities of ancient life was more or less completely unresponsive to running a continent-wide empire. And it's also simply not true that the Legions "spent most of their time" terrorizing the rural populations. They spent most of their time securing the empire's borders, with intermittent periods of being called back to Rome (or, later, Constantinople, Ravenna, or wherever) to install a new emperor.

Roman culture actively derided scientific advance, philosophy and scientific explorations were seen as effete. they destroyed the technological and scientific advances of the Greeks. The Greeks had developed clockwork mechanisms to the point where they were used to stage 'robotic' plays, and there was work being done with the power of steam - Romans fucked that over.
Also not fair nor true. On the whole, the Romans lacked the Greek preoccupation and skill with philosophy and science, but they certainly respected it throughout their history, which was a key part of the reason (alongside well as military and economic concerns) why imperial power tended to shift towards the Hellenized east over time. Also, one of the key reasons why Marcus Aurelius was so admired by both ancient observers was because of his philosophical work.

Greek science and philosophy was on the decline from the time of Alexander the Great. And I wouldn't blame Alexander for it, either: it was just a product of the era.

essentially the roman culture and its political structure meant that the empire couldn't feed itself and it couldn't evolve to meet challenges. In comparison the Germanic 'barbarians' were politically egalitarian and to some extent democratic, certainly more vibrant and healthy as a society.
The empire fed itself fairly well, actually. They relied on certain provinces (mainly Egypt) to serve as their breadbasket, but that's not particularly unique: the USA would have troubling feeding itself if you took away the midwest, for instance. And I would also ask why, if the Germanic peoples were so much more "vibrant and healthy," they all rushed to imitate Roman institutions, culture, and (to some extent) politics when they were on the ascendant? Though I wouldn't suggest that Rome was perfect, they were without a doubt the "it" civilization when it came to social, cultural, and political standards even up through their decline.

To the point raised at the start of this thread, I'm not sure that we're even talking about alternate history here. Rome did become more centralized, and it did prevent its collapse. In the east. The Byzantines were far more centralized than the western-based empire ever was, and that's pretty much what kept them around, in some form or another, until the start of the early modern era. The problem was that when we think of "Rome," we think of a Mediterranean-wide empire stretching from the border of Scotland to the border of Arabia. And it's really not that easy to enforce a truly centralized authority over that large an area, even in the modern day, let alone in late antiquity. The only way a centralized government was going to help Rome was if Rome jettisoned its outlying regions and focused on a central, productive core. Which is what they did.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
The loss of population led to recruitment of Germanic mercenaries, and also meant that once those mercenaries started turning on the Empire, it was unable to deal with the challenge they presented.

The problem was never the use of germanic mercenaries, it was then they began to use germanic officers instead of romans, after that it was only a matter of time before the confederatis became the entire army, and then the army had more loyalty to some tribal identity than to Rome.
 
I know it sounds trite, but the answer to this question lies in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; a daunting read to say the least (my edition comes in at over 1,400 pages :eek:) But i will add to whats been said if i might, and say that it did have a lot to do with corruption, religious infighting (the transformation from Roman-Paganism to Christianaity, and also the settling of "Barbarians", amongst a great many thuings.
 
Gibbons' does have a complete political history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he doesn't any of the next 200+ years of research into it, not that those 200 years made the conclusion of just why Rome declined any easier. His willingness to chalk it up to societal laziness and corruption, along with general stagnation, is just a little too easy. I think that even he realizes this, since he does touch on the idea of severe population loss, and I think that a lot of the exact definition of words is lost in the translation (200 years is a long time in the English language) though he never cites this as a reason for the Empire's decline per se.
 
Including Rome, there have been 26 superpowers in the world that have risen and fallen. The US is #27...makes one think...here is one of my favorite poems...Ozymandias


OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

John
Former USAF
www.realmilitaryflix.com

ozymandias.GIF
 
Just curious, but what are #1-26, other then Rome. If you could provide a source or something, that'd be great.
 
The Republic was doomed in its then current form with the murder of Gracchus in the 2nd century and as an institution with Marian's dictatorship.

The truth is that the Roman Empire (in the West) fell because a certain Ostrogothic king decided it wasn't worth the effort of appointing a puppet Emperor. The processes that led up to this event are myriad and by no means simplifiable down to a single thing. The individual events that led up to this happening, had individual causes and they all eventually tallied up to that final one.

Which is why I said there would have to be reforms. Maybe giving the plebes a bigger voice would help. The only question is why that reform would be made. Maybe after a series of riots the Senate figures that giving them more of a voice would reduce the rioting.
 
Because the only other "nations" around were barbarian tribes who had to build up a culture again?
Except that they didn't. The barbarians were hardly "barbaric" in that sense of the word. Both Ostrogothic Italy and Visigothic Spain maintained continuity with late Roman cultural and political institutions. The Franks built up a fairly significant empire a century or so later. The Eastern half of the original Roman empire did quite well for itself for a while, and only seriously fell into decline when it came up against Islam, which had plenty of culture of its own. Only at the very far edges of the old Roman world (mainly Britain) was there a truly serious backslide, and even that only lasted for a couple of generations.

There was plenty of culture in the post-Roman world, and much of it still revolved around the old imperial poles of Rome and Constantinople. The difference was the lack of centralized political authority, at least in the west. I thought the old "Dark Ages" canard had been put to rest long ago.... Just because there were a couple of dozen states where once there was just Rome doesn't mean that there wasn't any cultural achievement. And while the cultural priorities of Europe during the Middle Ages were markedly different from those of classical Rome at its height (and from our modern sensibilities), most of that change had taken place while the empire itself was still going strong. Keeping the political entity known as Rome alive wouldn't have meant the continued dominance of classical culture.
 
Which is why I said there would have to be reforms. Maybe giving the plebes a bigger voice would help. The only question is why that reform would be made. Maybe after a series of riots the Senate figures that giving them more of a voice would reduce the rioting.
The patrician/plebeian rivalry was simply not that significant by that time. The Conflict of the Orders had been resolved (more or less) several generations before. One of the two available consular positions each year was set aside for a plebe (the same was not true for the patricians), and the only true legislative authority in the state, the Tribunes, were exclusively plebeian. Besides which, the lines between patrician and plebeian were eroding rapidly: there were plenty of plebeian senators by this time, and although claiming the title of patrician still had some cultural prestige, it was increasingly more a social formality than a real political consideration.

The conflict at the time of the revolution was between the Optimates and the Populares, which, broadly speaking, breaks down as conservative versus progressive. It was certainly class-based, but it wasn't so simple as "patrician versus plebeian." And, the thing is, the lower classes really came out on top, at least nominally: Julius Caesar was an avowed Populare, and his support came primarily from the lower classes, a support inherited by Octavian. The fundamental problem is that the republic's government was not etched in stone: most of the "rules" that governed it weren't etched in stone, but were rather accepted as the traditional way of doing things. And once a significant number of people stopped accepting those traditions, it was only a matter of time before the system unraveled. Which is how Octavian slowly but surely usurped all of the important powers of the republican government into one person: he didn't introduce new powers, he merely took over many existing powers and did so not only with the support of the people, but with their eager consent.

But all of this really escapes the larger issue. Leaving aside the specific issues, the underlying problem is that the lower classes felt the Senate was unresponsive to their needs because the Senate was unresponsive to their needs. When Rome was a smallish city-state, democratic/republican elections were an effective way of running the government. But you can't do that when you're managing a empire stretching from France to Egypt. For a while, they tried an imperialistic approach, where the Romans (that is, the people living in Rome) dominated everyone else in the empire. This is pretty obviously not a viable long-term solution: eventually, the provincials got sick and tired of having no political voice and revolted (the Social War, for instance), and the Romans needed to offer citizenship more freely. And suddenly yearly elections for the consulate became logistical nightmares: how do you coordinate an election encompassing all of Italy (not to mention Spain, France, Greece, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc.) given the limitations of travel and communications in the first century BCE? The other option (also exercised to an extent) was to build up the military in order to manage dissent. But that, also, is a problem: how do you stop that military from being used to influence the political scene?

Simply put, the republic was a victim of its own success. It built an empire, sure, but it didn't scale well enough to be able to govern an empire. To keep the republic alive, you'd need to kill the empire.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Because the only other "nations" around were barbarian tribes who had to build up a culture again?

Not really so, by the time of Romes final fall the 'barbarians' had been in the Empire or hundreds of years and were quite as much civilized as any Roman.

Besides, that's pretty much the situation when any civilization fell. In the Ancient world it happened over an over, but always another would step in and take over, the locus of civ might shift but it never went away entirely, let alone into a period of worldwide decline

And the decline after 500 was truly worldwide, even China was included.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Because the only other "nations" around were barbarian tribes who had to build up a culture again?

Not really so, by the time of Romes final fall the 'barbarians' had been in the Empire or hundreds of years and were quite as much civilized as any Roman.

Besides, that's pretty much the situation when any civilization fell. In the Ancient world it happened over an over, but always another would step in and take over, the locus of civ might shift but it never went away entirely, let alone into a period of worldwide decline

And the decline after 500 was truly worldwide, even China was included.
 
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